The Complete Stories - Flannery O'Connor [118]
“I want to talk to you,” she said and beckoned him to the edge of the thicket where it was shady. He took off the cap and followed her, smiling, but his smile faded when she turned and faced him. Her eyebrows, thin and fierce as a spider’s leg, had drawn together ominously and the deep vertical pit had plunged down from under the red bangs into the bridge of her nose. She removed the bent picture from her pocket and handed it to him silently. Then she stepped back and said, “Mr. Guizac! You would bring this poor innocent child over here and try to marry her to a half-witted thieving black stinking nigger! What kind of a monster are you!”
He took the photograph with a slowly returning smile. “My cousin,” he said. “She twelve here. First Communion. Six-ten now.”
Monster! she said to herself and looked at him as if she were seeing him for the first time. His forehead and skull were white where they had been protected by his cap but the rest of his face was red and bristled with short yellow hairs, his eyes were like two bright nails behind his gold-rimmed spectacles that had been mended over the nose with haywire. His whole: face looked as if it might have been patched together out of several others. “Mr. Guizac,” she said, beginning slowly and then speaking faster until she ended breathless in the middle of a word, “that nigger cannot have a white wife from Europe. You can’t talk to a nigger that way. You’ll excite him and besides it can’t be done. Maybe it can be done in Poland but it can’t be done here and you’ll have to stop. It’s all foolishness. That nigger don’t have a grain of sense and you’ll excite…”
“She in camp three year,” he said.
“Your cousin,” she said in a positive voice, “cannot come over here and marry one of my Negroes.”
“She six-ten year,” he said. “From Poland. Mamma die, pappa die. She wait in camp. Three camp.” He pulled a wallet from his pocket and fingered through it and took out another picture of the same girl, a few years older, dressed in something dark and shapeless. She was standing against a wall with a short wornan who apparently had no teeth. “She mamma,” he said, pointing to the woman. “She die in two camp.”
“Mr. Guizac,” Mrs. McIntyre said, pushing the picture back at him, “I will not have my niggers upset. I cannot run this place without my niggers. I can run it without you but not without them and if you mention this girl to Sulk again, you won’t have a job with me. Do you understand?”
His face showed no comprehension. He seemed to be piecing all these words together in his mind to make a thought.
Mrs. McIntyre remembered Mrs. Shortlev’c words: “He understands everything, he only pretends he don’t so as to do exactly as he pleases,” and her face regained the look of shocked wrath she had begun with. “I cannot understand how a min who calls himself a Christian,” she said, “could bring a poor innocent girl over here and marry her to something like that. I cannot understand it. I cannot!” and she shook her head and looked into the distance with a pained blue gaze.
After a second he shrugged and let his arms drop as if he were tired. “She no care black,” he said. “She in camp three year.”
Mrs. McIntyre felt a peculiar weakness behind her knees. “Mr. Guizac,” she said, “I don’t want to have to speak ‘you about this again. If I do, you’ll have to find another place yourself. Do you understand?”
The patched face did not say. She had the impression that he didn’t see her there. “This is my place,” she said. “I say who will come here and who won’t.”
“Ya,” he said and put back all his cap.
“I am not responsible for the world’s misery,’ she said as an afterthought.
“Ya,” he said.
“You have a good job. You should be grateful to be here,” she added, “but I’m not sure you are.”
“Ya,” he said